Beginner in Game Development? Read here.Super Mario Bros clone tutorial written in XNA 4.0 [MonoGame, ANX, and MonoXNA] by Scott Haley
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Spoiler

How on earth can you go around telling lies, be shown that they are lies, then continue to ignore the evidence to the contrary. I'm not qualified to deal with this, sorry. - HodgmanNever crash to desktop. That's the equivalent of a Starbucks rep punching you in the face when you try to order a coffee with soymilk when they run out of soymilk. - KoobazaurFor programmers, R & D means "Research & Duplicate".Just remember... XML is like violence. If it doesn't work, you just aren't using enough of it... - MoeEvery time I go into my account settings I feel like I've never used the internet before. - booleanPerson X: Do you want to live forever?
Person Y: No, but I want to live a long life.
Person X: Only cowards live that long.
Person Y: And yet, we travel to seek the counsel of these "cowards".

Ownership of my games: Either DRM-free, so I can copy them, or at the very least, future versions of the same console shouldn't make me repurchase the same downloadable games.

Don't require server connections for single-player games.

Ease of use: Click 'download' on a game I purchased, and I boot up a different game while the first game downloads in the background.

Doesn't try to trick me: Don't make me buy your own currency. If I want to buy a $7.50 game, don't make me buy $10 worth of your money.

Any game available on disk should also be available for digital purchase (and buying a disk gives the digital version as well). I don't buy games at $60 or $50. If the game never decreases in price, I'm either going to buy it used (unfortunately giving you no money as a developer) or not buy it at all.

[minor change of topic]

This is why I buy on Steam. The people who want to play the game the second it comes out, they feel it's worth $60 to them - that doesn't mean it's worth $60 to everyone. After a year, it should be $40. After another year, $20. From time to time, it should go on sale for $10-15. That's when I'll pick it up... Not because I don't want developers to profit, but simply because very very few games are ever worth $60 to me personally. When I do buy a game for $15, then I want the money to go to the developers. By not decreasing the prices a reasonable amount over time, it's the developers (well, okay, the publishers) who drive customers to used-game sales and (worst case) to piracy.

The annual amount I spend on games? Less than $100 total. If your products aren't within my price range, then I won't buy your games, or I'll buy them used. I'm fine buying 4-year old games - but if you don't make them available to me (because once they stop selling, then you stop producing disks) then I can't buy them. Digital distribution has reduced your: A) disk manufacturing costs, B) distribution costs, C) middlemen costs. Instead of $50 dollar games decreasing in prices, they rose to $60 prices instead. Okay, so I'm oversimplifying, and ignoring rising game development costs, rising marketing costs, and the economic downturn. But if the economic downturn hurt studios so badly, how do you think they hurt consumers? The response should've been cutting costs, not raising prices, otherwise you drive more customers to used-sales and piracy.

I don't want $1 games on the iPhone either. Give me a happy middle. $10-$20 games (several years after release) for 10-20 hours of gameplay. No hidden fees and no monthly fees.

[/derail]

Other than that, lots of cooperative splitscreen games. I like local coop and local multiplayer.

Would it be unhelpful to say I really wish consoles would go away and all new games would come out for the PC...? Though, I wouldn't say no to a tablet phone (like a smart phone with a much bigger screen and a little usb gamepad and headphones, and I could read my ebooks on it while listening to my mp3s).

Phone game idea available free to someone who will develop it (Alphadoku game - the only existing phone game of this type is both for windows phone only and awful. PM for details.)

I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.

It would be nice if console manufacturers would stop thinking indie developers have cooties or whatever. We wont kill game sells by creating indie content.

I know right! This is not going to be the case with my product.

Ownership of my games: Either DRM-free, so I can copy them, or at the very least, future versions of the same console shouldn't make me repurchase the same downloadable games.

Don't require server connections for single-player games.

Ease of use: Click 'download' on a game I purchased, and I boot up a different game while the first game downloads in the background.

Doesn't try to trick me: Don't make me buy your own currency. If I want to buy a $7.50 game, don't make me buy $10 worth of your money.

Any game available on disk should also be available for digital purchase (and buying a disk gives the digital version as well). I don't buy games at $60 or $50. If the game never decreases in price, I'm either going to buy it used (unfortunately giving you no money as a developer) or not buy it at all.

[minor change of topic]

This is why I buy on Steam. The people who want to play the game the second it comes out, they feel it's worth $60 to them - that doesn't mean it's worth $60 to everyone. After a year, it should be $40. After another year, $20. From time to time, it should go on sale for $10-15. That's when I'll pick it up... Not because I don't want developers to profit, but simply because very very few games are ever worth $60 to me personally. When I do buy a game for $15, then I want the money to go to the developers. By not decreasing the prices a reasonable amount over time, it's the developers (well, okay, the publishers) who drive customers to used-game sales and (worst case) to piracy.

The annual amount I spend on games? Less than $100 total. If your products aren't within my price range, then I won't buy your games, or I'll buy them used. I'm fine buying 4-year old games - but if you don't make them available to me (because once they stop selling, then you stop producing disks) then I can't buy them. Digital distribution has reduced your: A) disk manufacturing costs, B) distribution costs, C) middlemen costs. Instead of $50 dollar games decreasing in prices, they rose to $60 prices instead. Okay, so I'm oversimplifying, and ignoring rising game development costs, rising marketing costs, and the economic downturn. But if the economic downturn hurt studios so badly, how do you think they hurt consumers? The response should've been cutting costs, not raising prices, otherwise you drive more customers to used-sales and piracy.

I don't want $1 games on the iPhone either. Give me a happy middle. $10-$20 games (several years after release) for 10-20 hours of gameplay. No hidden fees and no monthly fees.

[/derail]

Other than that, lots of cooperative splitscreen games. I like local coop and local multiplayer.

Great info and ideas.

< $ 300, API for indies, indies channel, keep it an offline console

You read my mind for the most part. Thanks.

I want familiar APIs and easy access to devkits. Also lots of memory.

Oh, and a userbase. Definitely need a userbase.

Thanks! Trust me, it will have lots of memory.

Lots of good games.

Beyond that... who cares, really?

Thanks

The ability to use the consumer version as a dev-kit would be my 'must have' feature.

Thanks

Thanks again! Continue to leave replies about what you would want to see in a next generation console. Kickstarter coming soon.

Probably the capacity to install a regular Linux distro on it (Debian for example). One can never have enough cheap Linux systems around

I'd be surprised if this console is not similar to Ouya (which has Android which is a Linux.... as you may already know).

Beginner in Game Development? Read here.Super Mario Bros clone tutorial written in XNA 4.0 [MonoGame, ANX, and MonoXNA] by Scott Haley
If you have found any of the posts helpful, please show your appreciation by clicking the up arrow on those posts

Spoiler

How on earth can you go around telling lies, be shown that they are lies, then continue to ignore the evidence to the contrary. I'm not qualified to deal with this, sorry. - HodgmanNever crash to desktop. That's the equivalent of a Starbucks rep punching you in the face when you try to order a coffee with soymilk when they run out of soymilk. - KoobazaurFor programmers, R & D means "Research & Duplicate".Just remember... XML is like violence. If it doesn't work, you just aren't using enough of it... - MoeEvery time I go into my account settings I feel like I've never used the internet before. - booleanPerson X: Do you want to live forever?
Person Y: No, but I want to live a long life.
Person X: Only cowards live that long.
Person Y: And yet, we travel to seek the counsel of these "cowards".

Ownership of my games: Either DRM-free, so I can copy them, or at the very least, future versions of the same console shouldn't make me repurchase the same downloadable games.

Just out of curiousity, how would you feel about a $15-$30 subscription that gives you access to any game at any time, but you don't own the games if you stop subscribing?

I think it would be interesting if consoles opened up more ways for monetization. A lot of people think f2p is dirty, but I would love to see what might happen if f2p was allowed to exist. I think if the console manufacturers were still involved you could get some really high quality f2p games on the console without as much of the trash. Mostly I'm just interested in more viable models than what exists now; unlike phones where you have to be more democratic, consoles could keep a really high quality bar for their different models.

Ownership of my games: Either DRM-free, so I can copy them, or at the very least, future versions of the same console shouldn't make me repurchase the same downloadable games.

Just out of curiousity, how would you feel about a $15-$30 subscription that gives you access to any game at any time, but you don't own the games if you stop subscribing?

OnLive's model? I think it's a good idea. I do the same thing with Netflix - I don't own any of the movies I watch, I just pay a monthly fee and access them as much as I want.

The problem is, it'd have to have the games I want for me to be interested, and live-streaming is most conducive to online multiplayer gaming (because the servers and the clients would run in the same datacenter), and unlikely to support many split-screen or local multiplayer games, which is what I enjoy most.

I recently started playing League of Legends, but I play it with one or two of my siblings sitting a few feet away from me on their laptops. It's just so much more fun that way for me.
I greatly enjoyed playing the old Halo games split-screen coop, and local multiplayer. Online multiplayer, while fun, was a different experience and just wasn't a good enough experience to be worth my time. I've played some of the Modern Warfare games online, just myself, and they're fun, but what I really enjoy (as a rather anti-social individual) is the social experience of playing with friends and family either competitively, or even better, cooperatively.

I think MMO subscriptions should be shared, though. Maybe two or three companies, each with a small MMO or two, unable to compete with World of Warcraft, let anyone subscribed to one of the games, play the others as well using the same account and subscription. $15 a month, and you can log into any one of 5 or 6 different MMOs of wildly different natures? If the user spends 75 hours online that month, his $15 is divided between whichever MMOs he played, based on how long he played. I think it'll be a viable strategy for smaller studios (50-200 employees) working together.

I think it would be interesting if consoles opened up more ways for monetization. A lot of people think f2p is dirty, but I would love to see what might happen if f2p was allowed to exist. I think if the console manufacturers were still involved you could get some really high quality f2p games on the console without as much of the trash.

Sony is permitting it with CPP's (maker of Eve Online) Dust 514 online FPS. It will be free-to-play, PS3/PS4 exclusive, and interacts with players playing Eve Online on the PC, but hasn't yet been released.

Just out of curiousity, how would you feel about a $15-$30 subscription that gives you access to any game at any time, but you don't own the games if you stop subscribing?

I haven't tried OnLive but I did this for awhile with shockwave.com. For quite a few years I felt like it was worth it then it seemed like the quality of the games started going down hill. Or maybe I felt like nothing innovative was coming out. I kinda also remember it being hard to search for games that interested me. Whatever it was, they didn't have games I wanted to play anymore and what they did have that caught my interest could be found on other flash sites for free. It was great for awhile and was how I found World of Goo, Diner Dash (original), and Plant Tycoon. Quite a few others as well. Probably not likely to do it again more because of gaming time being more limited these days.

I don't buy games at $60 or $50. If the game never decreases in price, I'm either going to buy it used (unfortunately giving you no money as a developer) or not buy it at all.

Personally, I don't mind paying > $50 for a game but when I'm done I had better feel like the game has enriched my life in the way that my English teachers had hoped that reading Shakespeare would. If I know that a game isn't going to do that then maybe somewhere around the $10 mark works for me.

It would be nice if console manufacturers would stop thinking indie developers have cooties or whatever. We wont kill game sells by creating indie content.

Its frankly not the console manufacturers that are worried about it, its the publishers who threaten to take their ball and go home if they give indies too much sway--that's what worries the manufacturers.

The reality, of course is that there's plenty of room for both large and small titles to exist and to thrive, but the established powers in any market never like ceding away any of their power, and most are paranoid-delusional about masses of nimble, unknown competitors because its such a foreign concept that they haven't any idea of what to expect or how to respond.